The Chinese government is working on several reform measures designed to move away from legacy technologies such as fax machines, wireless pagers and ISDN lines. The announcement by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) of China states that it will stop granting network access permissions to these legacy technologies.
This can be seen as a move to facilitate the country’s transition to newer technologies and as an indication that the country is moving towards certification of new products.
The MIIT announcement mentions that fixed phone terminals, wireless phone terminals, group phones, fax machines, modems (including cards), wireless pagers and many other categories will be affected by this step and will be replaced by newer tools such as VoIP.
While users probably won’t be affected by this change in the short term, we are certain that we are facing a preliminary warning that the country is planning to move away from legacy technology. This means that many users, and companies in particular, will soon need to invest in new technologies. In other words, a costly future is on the horizon for companies that still use products like fax machines.